The Horseshoe Brewery, St Giles

St Giles was one of the roughest parts of London in 1814. Its residents were poor–labourers, piece workers, criminals, prostitutes, and others down on their luck. That luck was about to get a lot worse near the Horseshoe Brewery on 17th October 1814.  The brewery stood on the corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court Road, and produced more than 100,000 barrels a year of dark porter.

When a storehouse clerk, George Crick, inspected the 22 foot high fermentation vat in the afternoon of that day in October, he noticed that one of the 700-pound iron hoops that held the vat together had slipped off. His supervisors said it was nothing to worry about, and told him to write a note asking for it to be fixed. At 5.30, George heard an explosion. The hot fermenting ale had burst free with such force that it tore the vat to splinters, knocked down the brewery’s back wall, and set off a chain reaction among the other fermentation vats and barrels in the building. Workers climbed on tables, and scrambled up walls. But several needed to be pulled free from rubble or rescued from the surging liquid.

An engraving of the event made at the time.

The first death was a 14 year old servant girl, who was scouring pots at a pump when the wall of the Tavistock Arms fell on her. The 1.3 million pints of beer in the first vat, augmented to 3.23 million pints by the rest of the burst containers, flooded from the building in a wave 15 feet high. The flood swept away everything in its path. It inundated basements causing the tenements above to collapse.  In one of those basements, five women were holding a wake for a two year old boy who had been killed the previous day. All five drowned. In all, eight women and children died.

Hundreds of people gathered the spilled beer in containers, or simply drank what they could on the spot. As the flood subsided, spectators came from all over London to see the sight of the disaster, and the local watchmen made a bit of money charging a penny or two to see the damage the flood had done.

That part of St Giles reportedly stank of beer for months afterwards.

Note to self. To Claim the Long-Lost Lover is set in London in the last months of 1814.  Mention the smell in the scene I set in St Giles towards the end of November.